Paris: With Pen and Pencil eBook

One pleasant feature of Paris is its great number
of baths, public and private. The artisan who
has little money to spare can go to the Seine any
day, and for six cents take a bath under a large net
roofing. A gentleman, to be sure, would hardly
like to try such a place, but the working people are
not particular. It is cheap, and in the hot weather
it is a great luxury to bathe, to say nothing of the
necessity of the thing. To take a bath in a first-rate
French hotel is quite another matter. Every luxury
will be afforded, and the price will be quite as high
as the bath is luxurious.

Pleasure trips are getting to be quite common in France,
in imitation of the English, on a majority of the
railways. The fares for these pleasure trips
are very much reduced. I noticed the walls one
day covered with advertisements of a pleasure trip
to Havre and back for only seven francs. The
second and third class carriages on the French railroads
are quite comfortable, but the first are very luxurious.
Trains run from Paris to all parts of the country,
at almost all hours of the day and night.

PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS.

There is no city in the world so blessed with educational
institutions of the first class as Paris, and no government
fosters the arts and sciences to such an extent as
the French government, whether under the administration
of king, president, or emperor. The government
constantly rewards discoveries, holds out prizes to
students and men of genius. The educational colleges
are without number, and the lectures are free.
There is one compliment which the stranger is forced
to pay the French government—­it encourages
a republicanism among men of genius in learning, the
arts and sciences, if it does put its heel upon the
slightest tendency toward political republicanism.

And not Paris, or France alone, reaps the advantage
of this liberality—­the whole civilized
world does the same. Go into the university region,
and you will always see great numbers of foreigners
who have come to take advantage of the public institutions
of Paris. The English go there to study certain
branches of medicine, which are more skillfully treated
in the French medical schools than anywhere else in
the world. Many young Americans are in Paris,
at the present time, studying physic or law.

The difference between the cost of education in England
and France is great. Three hundred dollars a
year would carry a French student in good style through
the best French universities. To go through an
English college five times that sum would be necessary.